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Back thanks to lack of popular demand! The quotes page... Here you'll find some quotes I've found in many places:
It is often said that history is written by the winners. When I look around this room, I have my doubts.
- Unknown speaker at a Medieval Studies Conference.
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
- Paul Erdös
Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre. The main mast is broken, the cabin boy is on deck, there are 12 passengers aboard, the wind is blowing east-north-east, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the captain?.
- Gustave Flaubert
He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts - for support rather than illumination.
- Andrew Lang
Black holes are where God divided by zero.
- Steven Wright
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
- Mark Twain
Computer Science is no more about computers than Astronomy is about telescopes.
- E. W. Dijkstra
Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.
- Woody Allen
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Shakespeare (Hamlet)
[...] when you have exluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes - The Sign of Four)
Don't speak unless you can improve the silence.
- The Dene in the Western Arctic
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur. (Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound)
- Roedy Green
Sedulously eschew obfuscatory hyperverbosity and prolixity.
- Roedy Green
I don't need to test my programs. I have an error-correcting modem.
- Om I. Baud
The search for truth is more precious than its possession.
- Albert Einstein
He who learns but does not think, is lost!
- Confucius
The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do.
- B. F. Skinner
If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.
- Bertrand Russell
Wherefore code in C when, verily, doth the virtual function not cleaner abstractions yield, and thusly painful debugging reduce?
- William Francis Renner (Personal communication)
A computer once beat me at chess but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
- Emo Philips
To have peace with this peculiar life; to accept what we do not understand; to wait calmly for what awaits us, you have to be wiser than I am.
- M. C. Escher
Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
- Henri Poincaré
Facts do not speak.
- Henri Poincaré
I evidently knew more about Economics than my examiners
- John Maynard Keynes, one of the XXth century's most influential economists,
referring to his poor marks in Economics in the British Civil Service Exam
The Axiom of Choice is obviously true, the well-ordering principle obviously false, and who can tell about Zorn's Lemma?
- Jerry Bona. (This one is for mathematicians ;o))
Mathematics is the succesful branch of Philosophy
- Jacob Eliosoff (Personal communication)
$PhD = \lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} Masters ^ n$
- William Francis Renner (Personal communication)
Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.
- Samuel Johnson
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
- Lily Tomlin
Scientists have proven
A fact I find distracting.
When we fall in love
It's just chemicals reacting.
I console myself however
At their lack of sensitivity,
In the knowledge that their thinking's
Just electrical activity.
- David Walters (in a letter to The Economist)
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